To appreciate The Future, Miranda July’s ingeniously constructed wonder cabinet of a movie, you may first have to pass through a stage of mild annoyance or even something more intense. A recent profile in the New York Times Magazine depicted July — a quiet figure on the screen and a thoughtful, witty presence on the page — as an improbably polarizing filmmaker, as likely to be scorned for her supposed preciosity as celebrated for her ingenuity. And the first part of The Future seems, quite deliberately, to test the spectrum of audience response.
The two main characters, Sophie and Jason, a Los Angeles couple played by July and Hamish Linklater, are sweet and sincere, but also maddeningly passive, and their tentative, timid approach to their own lives might inspire equal measures of protectiveness and impatience. We first see them on the couch of their modest, bohemian apartment, each with a laptop, looking more like twins or a shaggy, bony, two-headed creature than a couple.
Sophie and Jason dwell in a state of becalmed, bemused anxiety. Though they are well into their 30s and measure the span of their relationship in years, they seem as shy and unworldly as children, passive-aggressively resisting the demands and enticements of adulthood. Sophie teaches dance classes for toddlers, Jason has a low-level tech job helping confused consumers troubleshoot over the phone, and the two of them, individually and as a pair, occasionally glance at a vague and receding horizon of ambition, artistic and otherwise.
Photo Courtesy of Joint Entertainment
“I thought by now I would have done more,” Jason says. “I thought I’d be a world leader.” There is enough ironic self-awareness in this observation to make it funny, and enough disappointment to make it sad and a bit irritating.
July subjects her characters — which is to say herself — to tactful satire without denying them sympathy. Sophie and Jason’s gentle, melancholy, cautious engagement with each other and with their own experience is self-conscious, but it also feels like an authentic response to the confusion and anomie that run like invisible threads through so much of American life.
Their scruffy, comfortable home, decorated with hippopotamus figurines and Escher prints, stocked with vintage-y clothes and rescued furniture, is a shrine to fading ideals of specialness. Their need to find and nurture a sense of uniqueness has led them into a state of quiet panic and paralysis — and also, perhaps, to the Etsy Web site, where you can purchase handmade or handed-down accouterments of individuality.
But The Future is much more than a precise, deadpan portrait of a sensibility likely to be recognizable to the Sophies and the Jasons in the audience (or to anyone who has run into them at the local coffee shop, organic bakery or artisanal ice cream truck). July’s gift as a filmmaker, very much evident in her first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, lies in her ability to will the prosaic facts of the world into a condition of wonder. The anti-literal aspects of The Future might be described as surrealism, magic realism or Jabberwockian nonsense, but none of these terms quite capture her ability to blend whimsy and difficult emotion.
The Future begins with narration supplied in the scratchy, high-pitched voice of a cat. This creature, a wounded, sickly stray known as Paw-Paw, is in a shelter, waiting for Jason and Sophie to adopt him. He represents their long-deferred acceptance of adult responsibility, and a chance to break out of the malaise of waiting around for something to happen. In the month before they take their new pet home — where they will provide him, above all, with a comfortable place to die — Jason and Sophie set out to make up for lost time. They quit their jobs, and Jason volunteers for an environmental organization, while Sophie sets out to record a series of dances that she hopes will bring her recognition.
Their forays into art and activism have mixed results, but The Future itself blossoms into something affecting and peculiar. In addition to the talking cat, there is a talking moon, a T-shirt that moves on its own and Jason’s sudden discovery of the power to stop time. These phenomena coexist with a more mundane story of betrayal and disappointment: a funny-sad relationship drama about love gone astray. Sophie, drifting away from Jason (and perhaps feeling the stirrings of a buried maternal instinct), stumbles into an affair with Marshall (David Warshofsky), a suburban dad whose main virtue seems to be his easy tolerance of eccentricity.
Another filmmaker might have told the tale of this love triangle in a straightforward fashion, putting together yet another mild, mopey movie about a young couple in crisis. But the magical, metaphorical strain in The Future is what makes it powerful, unsettling and strange, as well as charming. The everyday fears and frustrations that shadow us on our awkward trip through the life cycle often feel enormous, even cosmic, and July has the audacity to find images and situations that give form to those metaphysical inklings.
The complexity of The Future is contained in its title, which refers simultaneously to a terrifying abstraction — an unknowable territory bounded by death, eternity, the end of time — and to a concrete, trivial fact. What are you going to do next? It’s a huge, scary question, but the answer is usually to be small and specific. Use your imagination. Go see this movie.
Last week Elbridge Colby, US President Donald Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy, a key advisory position, said in his Senate confirmation hearing that Taiwan defense spending should be 10 percent of GDP “at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense.” He added: “So we need to properly incentivize them.” Much commentary focused on the 10 percent figure, and rightly so. Colby is not wrong in one respect — Taiwan does need to spend more. But the steady escalation in the proportion of GDP from 3 percent to 5 percent to 10 percent that advocates
A series of dramatic news items dropped last month that shed light on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attitudes towards three candidates for last year’s presidential election: Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Terry Gou (郭台銘), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It also revealed deep blue support for Ko and Gou from inside the KMT, how they interacted with the CCP and alleged election interference involving NT$100 million (US$3.05 million) or more raised by the
While riding a scooter along the northeast coast in Yilan County a few years ago, I was alarmed to see a building in the distance that appeared to have fallen over, as if toppled by an earthquake. As I got closer, I realized this was intentional. The architects had made this building appear to be jutting out of the Earth, much like a mountain that was forced upward by tectonic activity. This was the Lanyang Museum (蘭陽博物館), which tells the story of Yilan, both its natural environment and cultural heritage. The museum is worth a visit, if only just to get a
More than 100,000 people were killed in a single night 80 years ago yesterday in the US firebombing of Tokyo, the Japanese capital. The attack, made with conventional bombs, destroyed downtown Tokyo and filled the streets with heaps of charred bodies. The damage was comparable to the atomic bombings a few months later in August 1945, but unlike those attacks, the Japanese government has not provided aid to victims and the events of that day have largely been ignored or forgotten. Elderly survivors are making a last-ditch effort to tell their stories and push for financial assistance and recognition. Some are speaking
RSS